


Leavings of the Wolf

by deux (orphan_account)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Body Horror, Sexual Content, Violence, later on you're in for
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-22
Updated: 2015-02-01
Packaged: 2017-12-06 04:17:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/731359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/deux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The game is over, and you are back in your hive. The others are nowhere to be found.</p>
<p>Your eyes have filled in, but something unusual has come along with them. </p>
<p>Stigmatic burns on your wrists.</p>
<p>Dreams of things stirring and plotting in the darkest parts of the sea. Whispers in the daytime, hissing in your ears. Malevolent living shadows emerging from nothingness. Adult trolls stalking the land, seeking you out.</p>
<p>You are still Karkat Vantas, but this is not your Alternia. </p>
<p>-</p>
<p>A Bad End AU in which Karkat and Sollux go on the run, start a backwater snake church, wreak havoc on sopor distributors, kiss, and put the fear of the Church of Blood and Doom into their lowblood flock and the highbloods they incite violence against.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

-

This is not your Alternia.

That much is abundantly clear as soon as you wake up, no investigation necessary. The smell is different, first of all. There's something richer about it. Cloying, and almost sinister. It's oily and suspicious, and you spend a few minutes sniffing and analyzing. The hairs on the back of your neck tingle to life.

This place reeks of something distinctly false.

You don't know what the hell you were dreaming about before your eyes snapped open, and you can honestly say you're kind of grateful for that fact. The little bit that seeps through into your waking mind reminds you a whole lot of the culling dreams you know so well. (Daymares are a thing for everyone. No one talks about them. Outside of romance, trolls aren't crazy about commiseration.) There's a memory of hisses in a language you don't recognize- non-troll, non-human, and threatening in a way that you can't say you're familiar with.

That line of thought exhausted, you let yourself scan the place you've woken up in.

The hive you're in is your own. Somehow, that fails to be a relief. It is 6-sweep-old, naive, whiny Karkat Vantas' hive. Not a thing seems out of place on first inspection. Posters, romcoms... It is as messy and juvenile as the instant you were torn away from it to start the _game_.

And with that thought, your mind kicks into motion and everything comes screaming back.

Most of 'everything', anyway. Some bits are detailed beyond reality, as if they're miniature scenes pulled into focus right up under your nose. Other patches are inexplicably gone, ripped from your thinkpan and rearranged into an unsettling collage of wrong.

You try and try, but you simply can't fucking remember how the final showdown culminated. Who was the Big Bad in the end, anyway? Things glitch and shift and stutter into and then past your mind's eye, then dance around its peripheral frustratingly. Gamzee's name surfaces- his face and his fate skip and jump until you can't read either at all.

The hive buzzes with a present silence. You spend a few minutes sitting panicked on the floor, unable to grab trains of thought as they fly through your head. Vriska and Nepeta and Equius swim by like thin silver minnows thrashing in a pond, and in a split second of insight you catch glimpses of blood that do absolutely nothing to calm you down.

You're suddenly conscious of your own hyperventilation. You stumble off to park yourself on the edge of the recuperacoon. The room taunts you with calm while your head whirs along. It's like somewhere inside you an old fashioned tape is being fast forwarded to the end, and the player is erasing things selectively as it goes. Your memory is a stupid, corrupt, unwound movie.

Something snaps into place. Your breathing steadies, an unprompted resolve taking hold. Next thing you know, you're on autopilot: changing the sopor, scrubbing the sides of the 'coon, washing your hands, chewing each ground down nail into as menacing a point as you can manage. Sucked into the routine, your thoughts settle.

_Even if this isn't the right Alternia... maybe it's meant to be ours. Our reward. If I'm alive_ , you think, _all I have to do is make sure everyone else is. All the blood? All the bodies? Doesn't mean everyone stayed dead._

Unfrozen, you start to laugh a little to yourself, giddy on thoughts of winning. Fucking winning, after everything you'd been through. You might not remember every detail, but hell, you remember enough to fuel a lifetime of daymares.

The quiet persists.

You finally have your body and your mind on lockdown. _Some time apart from the others_ , you think, _won't be so bad_.

You'd been running low on sopor, apparently. The stuff you ended up using was a mixture of old and new. You let a hand fall down below the congealing top layer of sopor, and stir it around a little. The film breaks, gritty matte slime churning under. As the warmer, more fluid sopor works its way to the top, the fresh sheen of the stuff makes your reflection visible.

Your face is the same, maybe a little bit thicker, a bit more muscular in the jaw. Your lips have blackened ( _attractively_ , you think, _and thank god for small favors_ ). The upper half of your face is hidden in the distortion of moving sopor. You start to see your horns, a little bigger but no sharper, the beds of them a bit more vivid...

You stop stirring, and your stomach does a decidedly unacrobatic pirouette off the handle as the rest of your face solidifies.

Red eyes. And not just an unlucky lowblood's rust red (you'd always maintained hope that you'd get lucky there, ha fucking ha) but your own bright, candy red.

You jerk your hand back. _Holy shit_.

It takes a moment of relaxed concentration, your mind having earlier been a priority over the soreness in your body, but you start to feel the ache in your bones. Growth spurt. You are older. Fuck knows how much older, but judging by your eyes (red, red, pants shittingly motherfucking mutant red) old enough that you have basically no right to be this not-dead.

You try to center yourself. You take a deep breath, and hold it.

On the exhale, you double over, puke into the sopor, and pass out.

 

* * *

 

You dream that you are suspended in a sea of blue-grey. Tendrils of a weird rainbow of colors swirl in your vision, like oil rising to the surface. Your eyes are wide open- pinned that way, it feels- and you find that breathing comes naturally. You attempt to raise your hand up into your line of sight, but nothing comes. No body. You aren't aware of the usual dull thereness of your horns, of the sharp teeth in your mouth, of anything else that you're accustomed to.  Floating there in that strange sea, you are nothing and you are receptive.

You try to kick away, and with some effort you manage to direct your eyes elsewhere. Searching the darkening sea, you find Her. A white and pink mass of flesh, beckoning in the distance. She curls and uncurls in unintelligent anticipation, Her body language reminding you of a domestic cat lusus left unfed for too long. She is _The_   _Greatest Terror, The Voices That See_...

_She Who Waits Hungrily._

_They Who Are Wanting._

You don't recoil at Her presence. In the warm cocoon of the water, She feels like a mother to you (the word "mother" comes suddenly and naturally, so much so that even though it should unravel under scrutiny, dream-logic lets it be).

Mother. Mother Oceania.

Gl'bgolyb.

She calls to you in a voice that is familiar but unsettingly off. It's unnatural, like a beast of flight mimicking Alternian in its squawking speech. Something underneath seeps prophecy.

It's a voice that sows discord.

A vast tentacle extends in your direction. You reach out an invisible hand. Acknowledged, She lets Her voices spike and squeal. Blood pours from above and behind you in great clouds. Rust and gold and copper... Great plumes of it are sucked into those open mouths. Your vision falters, like a scratched disc skipping, and her main eyes have rolled back into her head. There are trolls in her beak now, some young and long dead and some healthier and still thrashing.

They disappear from sight forever.

She is satisfied. 

She turns away into the unfathomable depths. As she does, one of those wartish clouded eyes appears to fall on you.

**_THANK YOU_ **

**_GOOD GIRL_ **

**_SO GOOD, LOVE YOU, WONDERFUL_ **

**_BEST CHILD_ **

She writhes in delight, and your thinkpan is flooded with an intrusive emotion that you can translate only as _ **NOT HUNGER**_.

As the dark of the sea envelopes her, she calls to you in a long, resonating shriek.

 

* * *

 

_**SKREEEEE** , EEEE, EEEEEE_....

The alarm syncs with her voice, and rips you into the waking world. You spit out some sopor that's accumulated in your mouth. The noise is sounding somewhere off in the distance- far away enough that it takes some real eye strain to see what the cause is (once you gather your globes enough to peek outside). On the ramshackle cloth roof of a far away neighbor's hive, dabs of yellow flames are rising.

Above that, sharp 4 limbed shapes of red and tyrian and purple and black bob mechanically.

Imperial Drones. Plural.

This might not be your Alternia, but you're pretty sure drones are going to be bad news in any iteration of this hopelessly fucking bleak planet.

Before you can second guess yourself, you've hauled your body into the vomity, stinging sopor of the recuperacoon. Face submerged, nose protruding, you sit there, listening. The lip of the 'coon hides you pretty well (though you're about 500% certain that it won't do shit for you when the drones come knocking).

_EEEEE, EEEEE, EEEE_...

You hear the heavy chunk of drone feet touching down on earth.

Culling Day is essentially every troll's worst daymare. You figure that's what this must be, considering that it happens to be your worst daymare and literally nothing in your life ever goes the way you want it to.

Protocol is as follows: Drones arrive in the blazing heat of the sun, hoping to catch blood-fugitives off guard as they sleep. Incompetent, crippled, lususless lowbloods are woken up, dragged out into the open, and gutted on the spot. It isn't Pailing Day. There's no chance for survival, no regard for romance or the individual, no fuck-or-die scenario to laugh nervously about with a concupiscent partner in the future.

If the drones discover any of your neighbors, and they aren't up to par, they'll officially become ex-trolls in a matter of seconds.

_Chunk, chunk, chunk_.

You shudder at the noise. A lusus barks far closer than the din of the drones and the alarms, and you freeze.

You wonder where Crabdad is. Something tells you that the answer is "dead" or "getting there". You didn't spot a sign of him anywhere. Not a single scrap of his food, no little nervous scratches on the floor... it's almost as if he was never here in the first place.

All at once, the artificial noises stop. Wind carries the crackling of flames to your ears.

No screams. Drones aren't kind enough to kill trolls while they're out cold; if they'd found anyone, you would've known it by now. You wait and wait, but you don't hear any signs of them touching down to invade another hive. They might not be the most intelligent things roaming Alternia, but they're probably the most thorough. If there were any trolls to be dealt with, the drones would have dealt with them- and loudly. With no screams and no death gurgles, you can draw only one conclusion: everyone is already gone.

Your thighs are cramped from crouching in your 'coon like a cowardly tool. You stretch out your legs and gulp in fresh air.

The abandoned lusus howls and howls, but doesn't manage to drown out the sound of the embarassing comfort-chitters bubbling up from your own throat.

For the first time in a while you feel completely and utterly alone.


	2. Chapter 2

 

-

The fright sits low and cold in your gut for a long time. You aren't sure how long, exactly. The sopor should be doing something for your nerves (or at the very least for your aches), but the longer you sit there like an idiot the less it seems to do. Maybe it's the age of the stuff. It feels diluted, now that you've sat in it for a while; you realize you can run your hands through it even more easily than when you first renewed it. It has already grown colder.

And the vomit stonk continues to be a thing that's happening.

But you're okay with the smell. And even the pains, for now. The edge of the fear is sharp enough that everything else seems blunt and far away by comparison, anyway.

In any case, you hide there long enough that the adrenaline and the cramps actually begin to fade on their own.  _There it is_ , you think. _My ridiculous achy-ass carcass is finally accepting the fact that its status as living is about to be revoked._ But it doesn't happen. The drones don't come. The howls of the hound lusus become whines, and then it seems to drift away. You don't think it ever really stopped its whining. You think it just took the whining elsewhere.

You wonder if it's finally accepted the facts, too. You don't know what will happen to it. _Maybe it'll look for a new home._ You hope vaguely that your lusus would do the same, not just sit around clicking and snapping until something put him out of his misery.

You don't reflect much on the daymare (the dream, the vision, the... Big Fucking Whatever). All you know in those moments is that it was realer than it should have been. It felt _closer_ than a dream. Something tangible. 

You also know that you don't fucking care. You want your new life, even if it's gonna be as ridiculous and dangerous as your old life. You weren't ever really assured a prize for winning the game... just survival, if you managed to survive. Why would you get a utopia out of it?

Stupid. Dumb. Who would ever even bother hoping for that, honestly.

You think about the others again. The first to come to mind is Sollux. He does so in a glitchy mess of images that can barely be interpreted.

The gist of it is lots of blood, to the surprise of absolutely no one. But there's also a faint siren. The same drone alarm you heard earlier, just echoing far far away in your own cranial bulb. The more you reach for it, the farther away it seems. 

Despite your pessimism, something about it gives you hope. It feels like him. It feels, inexplicably, like the buzz of psionics.

The more you reach, the more it recedes, until there is nothing left. 

_Okay, asshole. Whatever._

In that moment, you decide that _OKAY, ASSHOLE, WHATEVER_  is going to be your new catch phrase. You decide that by all accounts you really have nothing to lose.

You're going to fuck it all and go outside. New Alternia might be even more treacherous, and New Improved Karkat Life might be short, but okay.

Whatever.

Down in your still redandblue buzzy skull, you get the distinct feeling that there is at least one familiar face out there for you to find.


End file.
